The news of a cyberstrike aimed at South Korea and the United
States has spread like wildfire since the Associated Press report
hit the news wires. The popular target to blame is North Korea,
however, only South Korean officials make those charges, U.S.
officials are remaining silent. If you take the political tension
with North Korea into account, could these cyberattacks kick off
another Cold War?

For those who remember, the Cold War started in the 1940s and
lasted until the early 1990s. Russia and the United States engaged
in espionage, propaganda and an arms race that included
conventional and nuclear weapons, leading to technological weapons
developments that we are just now starting to see in the public.
The parallel is technological advancement. The arms race has been
replaced by bandwidth and application development on a grand scale,
and the players are larger too, North Korea, China, small groups in
Russia, South Korea, as well as nations in the Middle East.

This cyberstrike started on July 4. Most of the U.S. was
celebrating Independence Day by blowing things up and holding
cookouts. Online, Internet properties owned by South Korean
government agencies and private companies started to slow to a
crawl, and eventually would go offline altogether. Likewise, at the
same time, the U.S.-based Internet properties such as the Treasury
Department, Department of Transportation, the Federal Trade
Commission and the White House, as well as the New York Stock
Exchange, Nasdaq, Washington Post, and Amazon were
targeted by what is being suggested as a coordinated Distributed
Denial of Service (DDoS) attack launched by North Korea.

“This is not a simple attack by individuals. The attack appeared
to have been elaborately prepared and staged by a certain
organization or state,” Seoul’s National Intelligence Service (NIS)
said in a statement. “The only site that was hit pretty bad (in the
U.S.) was the Federal Trade Commission, ftc.gov,” said Johannes
Ullrich, CTO for SANS Internet Storm Center, when speaking to the
AFP.

Two U.S. sites had major performance issues for a number of
days, reports Keynote Systems, Inc, the FTC, and Department of
Transportation. A number of additional U.S. sites have had
intermittent issues the last few days, Keynote added.

According to their data, FTC.gov went offline on July 5 at 9
a.m. (EST). It was completely down July 6 at 8 p.m. EST. As of July
8, FTC.gov “continues up to this hour to have major issues though
not (100 percent]) down.” Department of Transportation, which has
had no issues since it came back online July 6, suffered over 30
hours of downtime.

IDG News said an unnamed source told them the attacks directed
as much as 20 to 40 gigabytes of bandwidth per second during their
height. They have since settled down to about 1.2 gigabytes per
second. This is a massive amount of traffic. The attack was caused
by 12,000 hijacked computers in South Korea and 8,000 across the
globe, NIS and U.S. authorities say. This number is reported to be
much higher, according to Symantec, who counts 50,000 hijacked
systems, and the Washington Post says 60,000. The numbers
don’t matter, however, what matters is that they were used in an
attempt to flood networks in Internet properties with so much
traffic that they simply fell offline and it worked.